Tuesday, 26 April 2011

Fly Harder CD32 (SE) (Amiga CD32)

The original release of Fly Harder CD32 was identical to the standard Amiga disk version, even down to the poorly executed joystick controls - despite the fact that the CD32 joypad has an additional five buttons! As a result, the game generally received lower game review scores than the original did, with Amiga Power (who loved the disk version) stating that the poor controls had made the already difficult game "twice as hard again".

When you consider how difficult the game was when played by the preferred keyboard method on the standard Amiga, this oversight by Buzz actually resulted in the official CD32 version being near-impossible to play. Trying to make fine adjustments to your trajectory by pushing up on the joypad just doesn't feel right - and as Amiga Power rightly declared, why ignore the fact that the CD32 has additional buttons ideally suited to this task?

Unfortunately, the Amiga doesn't have a huge number of commercial Thrust games. The series of machines lacks a port of the original C64 classic, and in my opinion it's a real shame that a great game like Fly Harder was ruined for CD32 owners by such a simple flaw. I searched Aminet, WHDLoad and EAB fruitlessly for a patch, and then finally decided to make a request on the Commodore Amiga Reverse Engineering (CARE) board for a fix. I didn't have to wait long - an enhanced version of the game was sitting on my hard drive within a matter of hours.

Thanks to the work of hitchhikr (NRL), CD32 owners can finally play this special edition of Fly Harder with a vastly improved control system. Thrust has been mapped to the red button (instead of up), and you can fire by pressing the green button. This method was implemented following rigorous play-testing and it has been designed so the player can rest the base of their thumb on thrust, and fire by using the tip of their thumb. These instructions are also included within the new, Special Edition jewel-case insert as well as on disc (in the Docs folder) and displayed on a intro message screen before the game loads.

In addition to this, hithhikr also fixed an audio bug present in the retail version's intro sequence, as well as modifying the game code so that high scores are now saved to the CD32's NVRAM.